Citron, Michelle

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My art experiments with ways to tell the stories of women's lives. Initially, I made
structuralist films that told their tale through formal manipulation and metaphor. These
evolved into experimental narratives that intentionally blurred the boundaries between
fiction, documentary, and experimental practices. I was seeking a language with which to
speak, as well as to question the categories themselves.

My current work uses the interactivity of new media to probe the idea of story in our
post-modern, digital age of TV channel surfing, interactive games, hypertext, and complex
websites. I'm keenly interested in new media's potential as a narrative art. Rather than
being just a fascination with the latest tools I believe that at its core, interactivity expresses a
deeply human tension between fragmentation and narrative cohesiveness, even memory is
understood to be a narrative actively constructed at the moment of remembering from stored
fragments. This tension between fragmentation and unity has been central in my work since
the beginning. (Even before the beginning if I include my doctoral work in cognitive
psychology where I investigated how the mind creates narrative coherence out of the mass of
fragmented stimuli that constantly flood us.) Integration takes twenty-five still images and
optically prints them to give unity, temporality, and movement to that which was fragmented,
discontinuous and still. Daughter Rite and What You Take For Granted... create
fragmentation whenever the documentary, fictional, and experimental threads interrupt one
another; in this way, their stories are constructed through shifting and contradictory points of
view. The fragmentation creates unexpected juxtapositions, which expresses complexity and
ambiguity. Since my films speak of women's lived experience in all its messiness, form
melds into content. My CDs continue this exploration. Created at the intersection of new
media's interactivity and conventional linear film, they investigate the contradictions of
lesbian lives, desires, and culture, as well as the paradoxes of narrative itself.

Recent Submissions

Mixed Greens is a web-based artwork that uses interactivity to tell a story of the
complexities of identity. It will be a mixed genre piece using documentary, fiction,
sound, and text. Mixed Greens interweaves two identity ...